Rust Software Engineering Intern, Chip Design Tools - Winter

Fab2•Austin, TX

3d•Onsite

About The Position

The fab2 team is building the software that silicon chip designers should have had 20 years ago. Designing a chip today means stitching together a pile of desktop software, much of it decades old. Studio is a fast, browser-based, multiplayer platform for designing and assembling whole chips, aiming to be like Figma plus GitHub for silicon. The primary goal is for a user to never have to install anything or leave the app to take a chip from idea to finished design, with schematic capture, physical layout, and simulation all in one place, end to end. Studio is one half of a bigger idea at Fab2: making chips should be fast. The team builds its own fab equipment for the same reason they build their own software, because the components for what they want don't exist yet. Studio is the design side of that, and the goal is to close the feedback loop between designing a chip and fabricating it, so the whole cycle gets faster. Users include chip and process engineers, meaning the feedback loop on your own work is short. It's a deep application, dozens of complex tools and the heft of Photoshop, but the aim is for it to feel as intuitive and powerful as Figma. The technology stack is Rust across the board, compiled to WebAssembly, with custom rendering using wgpu/WebGPU, and a single code path for both native and browser environments.

Requirements

Strong Rust, or serious C++/systems experience and the obvious curiosity to go deep in Rust.
Solid systems fundamentals: memory, performance, concurrency.
Ability to profile before optimizing.
Experience taking something slow and making it fast.
A track record of non-trivial software built from scratch and the ability to walk through it end to end.
A portfolio (GitHub is fine) is required.

Nice To Haves

A game, engine, or real-time background: ECS, scene graphs, spatial indexing, physics engines, frame budgets, GUI, low-latency input.
Some EE, analog and digital background.
Time lived inside deep, serious software, and opinions about it: Blender, Ableton, KiCad, CAD tools, DAWs, game engines.
Distributed or real-time systems: write-ahead logs, event sourcing, replication, CRDTs, OT, websockets.
Data pipelines.
Geometry, graph, and routing algorithms; spatial data structures; optimization.
Familiarity with schema evolution and serialization formats like Protobuf, Flatbuffers, Cap’n Proto.
Graphics and visualization: turning big, complex datasets into something legible, fast, and even beautiful on screen.
Custom rendering, shaders, GPU pipelines (WebGPU, Vulkan, OpenGL).
An interest in version control, not just using Git but how it works underneath.

Responsibilities

Own major features from design through shipping and touch the whole stack.
Develop deeply interactive, low-latency editing tools.
Implement a document model that can be diffed and merged like source code and is real-time collaborative.
Build the sync engine that streams edits between clients.
Develop a GPU canvas that renders millions of polygons smoothly.
Create simulation features where waveforms stream onto the screen as the solver produces them.
Contribute to a plugin system built on sandboxed WebAssembly components.
Develop a scripting API where a script is a first-class client.
Build integrations that send finished designs to the fab.